Patrick Marsch

Dr. Patrick Marsch received his Dipl.-Ing. and Dr.-Ing. degrees from Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, in 2004 and 2010, respectively. After leading a research group at TU Dresden, Germany, he is since 2011 heading a research department within Nokia Bell Labs (formerly Nokia Siemens Networks), Wroclaw, Poland, which is covering a wide range of 5G research topics such as radio resource management, mmWave communications, device-to-device communications, and mission-critical communications in the context of vehicular safety or wireless control. He has published 60+ journal or conference papers, co-edited 2 books, received 4 best paper awards, and received the Philipp Reis Prize for pioneering work in the field of Coordinated Multi-Point. Patrick has been general chair of various IEEE workshops, and has initiated the ULTRA2 series on workshops on ultra-low latency and ultra-high reliability in wireless communications. Patrick is the technical manager of the 5G PPP project METIS-II, which is the largest collaborative project aimed towards global consensus-building on the 5G radio access network design.

Presentations

In the past decade, there has been the trend in wireless communications infrastructure to more and more virtualize and centralize network functionality, i.e. to move functionality from distributed and dedicated physical network entities towards centralized general purpose server platforms, referred to as cloud computing. The main motivation for this is a better scalability, better utilization of compute resources as these can be more dynamically mapped to instantaneous demand, higher cost efficiency due to the usage of commodity server infrastructure, and easier reconfiguration and network evolution. In the advent of the Internet of Things, however, there is now the opposite trend to move network functionality and even applications towards the edge again, referred to as mobile edge computing or mobile edge clouds (MEC), as this is required for many novel applications where end-to-end latency is crucial, or which are based largely on local content and context, and where it would hence be inefficient to forward and process data in a highly centralized manner. This speech initially gives a detailed insight into specific application fields where MEC is highly relevant, as for instance communications for vehicular safety, industry automation, remote control such as for tele-surgery and -diagnostics, user-specific local content creation and delivery, and augmented reality. The presentation then explains the key challenges related to MEC and the main architectural and functional solutions to overcome these, before elaborating on the implications of MEC on the communications infrastructure value chain and possible new service ecosystems, as well as the implications of MEC on future software development in general. The talk is concluded with an overview of standardization activities related to MEC and a general timeline and outlook on the topic.